I've copied a bunch of large media files to an external hdd connected via USB. When I try to put them back on my notebook hdd (I open nautilus and move the files in F3-mode) I get a lot of hickups and the process can never be finished for any file. Something wrong with the external hdd?

Do you mean that files aren't transferred or does it stall right at the end and takes forever for the progress bar to go from 99% to a 100%? If its the latter, it seems to be a bug experienced by several folks.
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drNOct 28 '12 at 18:41

No the transfer starts and doesn't even get to a third before I get an error.
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arnoNov 3 '12 at 16:23

I have put an answer, but more details about the errors occurring would be helpful, and if any other error messages occur after trying to use the terminal (instead of the gui) to transfer files.
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user76204Nov 7 '12 at 17:34

We really need to know what the "hiccups" are before we can suggest any real solutions to this. A possible problem that I have seen is where the device is automounted and normal users are not give access to it (only root). Also, if it's an ext or other Linux partition and the user who wrote the files is different to the user trying to copy them. All of these a permissions problems but it would be nice to know what the error messages actually are.
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fabricator4Nov 10 '12 at 0:36

2 Answers
2

As we discussed in the comments, it is still possible to transfer your files to your device with the terminal (instead of the gui), even when there are spaces in the device name. You can either escape it with

/media/Your\ Drive or /media/"Your Drive"

(If you are on 12.10 the new location is /media/user/YourDrive, so please keep that in mind for the following instructions)

Then use something like rsync or gcp, as both of these have a progress bar and a verbose setting which reports the details of the transfer so you can see if any errors are occuring. As an example, rsync is particularly useful, and the command

@arno Escaping names like this example does work for me, but you have to use your own device name, and you can also use quotes /media/"your device" and that will work for your commands.
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user76204Nov 4 '12 at 1:30